Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

When Improbabilities Become Exponentially Improbable

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The first insight I had into the nonsensical nature of the random mutation (RM) part of the RM plus natural selection (NS) hypothesis came through my mathematical studies and experience in software engineering. See here for some probabilistic calculations about the most simple of all computer programs.

Of course, Darwinists always ask, How can you know that RM+NS can’t account for all of life? The answer is simple, and it’s called probabilistic combinatorics.

The underlying biochemical and information-driven functions of living systems are tightly integrated and controlled by an unimaginably complex, sophisticated, fault-tolerant, self-repairing, self-replicating computer program. Components of such a system cannot be altered to produce significant innovation without the simultaneous, coordinated alteration of the components with which they interact. This is what software engineers do, not copying errors.

This is a deafening cry of design.

A microbe did not mysteriously mutate into Mozart and his music, and most people, thankfully, are smart enough to figure out that this is a silly idea.

Comments
I am about 2/3 through Sean Carroll's book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful. In it he describes an incredible array of what he calls switches that turn on and off the various genes to produce each cell in our body during gestation. It sounds like there are tens of thousands or more of these switches in the genome all orchestrated in a perfect way to form the embryo. He says it would take a book of several thousand pages to describe the sequences of switches for the human body, each page densely packed with information. Yet he ascribes all this to be a product of chance. I think it is obvious from the comments we often get here that many people are so emotionally tied up in a world view that they will believe anything to support this worldview. This is odd when what is being discussed is science but what they choose to believe is driven by their worldview. The combinatorial processes that could produce an embryo are staggering and to believe that it could just happen by chance is really an example of their worship of their god of chance. In their eyes their god is more powerful than the God of traditional religion. By the way Carroll's book is an exercise in what I call the Kindergarten/Graduate School approach. The author starts out trying to explain the material as to an average person using easy to understand ideas and then get so complicated that it would take a graduate degree to follow what is said. It is an interesting book but in no way is there anything in it that supports Darwinism other than the author's personal comments. Insects and humans have identical developmental genes so Carroll says there must be a common ancestor that existed prior to the Cambrian Explosion that had these genes. But as of today nothing has been found prior to the Cambrian Explosion that could be this universal predecessor that gave rise to all the phyla of the Cambrian.jerry
September 16, 2006
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You mention that you're a computer software engineer. Here and there on this board, it's been commented on that 'engineers' seem to be naturally inclined to the ID perspective. The other element here is, of course, computer programming. Just as a reflection, it seems to me that it would be a great thing if biology students were required to take a class on computer programming. I did, back in the 70's; the good, old days when you had to punch your own cards, wait for some big main-frame computer, and hope to high heaven that you had all the cards in the right order. Anyone having gone through that experience would instinctively "know" that RM+NS just isn't going to get it done. And as to "randomness", anyone doing any kind of programming at all knows that the only kind of "randomness" you want in a program is the kind the "program in", for example, a Monte Carlo simulation program. Thus, it is not surprising that biological forms use "randomness" here and there; but that "randomness" is very likely "programmed in". So, paraphrasing the world-renowned Richard Dawkins, "Biology is the study of life forms that give the appearance of randomness." I believe that this strikes much more closely to the truth of life.PaV
September 16, 2006
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Gil, sometimes we stand back and see the "breathtaking inanity" as it seems to us, of conssidering RM+NS the origin of the biosphere. Others stand back and marvel at the "breathtaking inanity" of ID. I wonder what distorts at least one of the two pictures?idnet.com.au
September 16, 2006
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